Joho the Blog
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January 19, 2006
Headline in the Brookline Tab: Vatican Denies Church's Appeal No, the Pope has not stated that Catholicism is unappealing. Rather, a local church's appeal not to be closed was denied. While I like being told metadata such as what's the maximum number of stars used in a rating system, I found this from the Boston Globe's Calendar section to be odd:
Is there a single instance of a rating system using stars to indicate negatives? Just wondering... And there's this, which was sent to my sister without attribution:
*FYA= For Your Amusement. Posted
by D. Weinberger at January 19, 2006 01:12 PM
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Comments
Hate to bring it up, but the star of David was once used negatively.
The pentagonal star might be used to rate unhealthily unchristian material?
1 star=not really Christian (Easter bunny)
2 stars=pagan (maypole dance)
3 stars=occult (halloween)
4 stars=very occult (ouija board)
5 stars=satanic (summon demon)
Posted by: Crosbie Fitch | January 19, 2006 01:51 PM
You probably already knew this, but just in case not: the intent of "four being the highest" is to distinguish it from a system where five is the highest. Probably it would be better if worded four being the highest possible" or something like that.
Posted by: David Coletta | January 19, 2006 02:30 PM
Oops. Reread your original post and I see you knew that already. Never mind, as the church lady says.
Posted by: David Coletta | January 19, 2006 02:31 PM
There is an extensive debate going on in the microformats list about whether star rating systems use zero stars or not, and how you might translate between zero-based and one-based star systems. It starts here.
Posted by: Kevin Marks | January 19, 2006 04:44 PM
There's a word (tag, if you like) for that horse flick, something like "the valley of discomfort".
Posted by: Branko Collin | January 22, 2006 10:52 PM
Lazy students you've got here; the correct phrase was of course "the uncanny valley" (select, right-click, Search in Google).
Perhaps there are no systems using stars denoting negatives, but perhaps there are systems using other icons denoting negatives, and stars may not necessarily mean "good" in one's culture.
The only way to find out is to test it, I guess.
Posted by: Branko Collin | January 23, 2006 04:57 AM